


For a moment

by Minkey222



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV), Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher
Genre: AU, Au from after Clay listens to his own tape, Clay is not okay, Each chapter is a separate side to the story, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mental Health Issues, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, The tapes, Tony Is a Good Bro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 03:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10654266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minkey222/pseuds/Minkey222
Summary: “Hey, you’re not going to do anything stupid tonight, are you?”“No.”“Promise me?”“I can’t promise anything, Tony.”For a moment Hannah Baker, the girl he killed, sits next to him at his kitchen table and smiles.It’s a sad smile, her eyes don’t crinkle at the corners. Her eyes are dull- dead.She just sits there. Her arms on the table, her hands connected loosely at the fingers.He blinks and she’s gone. He thinks he is going insane.No sane person sees a dead girl sitting at their kitchen table.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know that like no one is going to read this but honestly, I couldn't give a shit. I needed to get this out and out there. There are like no fics like this and I needed to read something to deal with everything that I'm feeling. Damn, that show is good. Comment if you want, It would be nice.

_ “Hey, you’re not going to do anything stupid tonight, are you?” _

_ “No.” _

_ “Promise me?”  _

Shaking his head for a second. He couldn’t look Tony in the eye. He couldn’t. How could he? Everything that just happened. Everything that did happen. With everything he did and everything he failed to do, how could he look him in the eyes? Just how could he? 

So he doesn’t.

  
“I can’t promise anything, Tony.”

And he gets out of the car before Tony can respond. He walks into his house and through the hallway. He goes into his kitchen and pulls out a chair. It scrapes against the floor tiles. It’s loud and angry. He ignores it. He sits in the chair. He places his elbows on the table, his head in his hands and he just stops. 

For a moment he doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. His heart doesn’t beat. For a moment, he feels, he knows what it’s like to be dead. The TV static in his ears doesn’t let him forget what he did. But the silence, it judges him. It points fingers at him. For a moment his eyes are shut. For a moment he feels a hand on his back.

  
For a moment Hannah Baker, the girl he killed, sits next to him at his kitchen table and smiles.

It’s a sad smile, her eyes don’t crinkle at the corners. Her eyes are dull- dead.

She just sits there. Her arms on the table, her hands connected loosely at the fingers. 

He blinks and she’s gone. He thinks he is going insane.

 

No sane person sees a dead girl sitting at their kitchen table.

 

He can’t sit here anymore, so he doesn’t. He stands and walks out the kitchen. Everything is sort of empty. He can’t explain it. He couldn’t even if he wanted to try. Just knowing what he knows. Knowing that everybody knows. It’s too much for a moment. 

For a moment he doesn’t know if he can live with it. He doesn’t know if he can live any way he can.

For a moment Hannah is back. Sat in his desk chair as he lies on the bed. She smiles the same smile. He looks at her for a second before turning over and screwing his eyes shut and crying himself to sleep.

He needs this all- the tapes, the guilt, the knowledge, Hannah- to be over. Just for a moment.

Maybe longer. Who knows?

That night. He doesn’t sleep very well. He always feels the prick on the back of his neck that someone is watching him. He doesn’t want to turn over because he knows if he does then he’ll see Hannah watching him.

He’s definitely going insane and he knows how this will end.

He wonders if this is how Hannah felt.

* * *

 

The next day he wakes up. Hannah’s not there anymore but he knows that every corner he turns, every door he goes through, in every room he enters Hannah will be sat there. She’ll smile at him and he’ll turn away but every glance he spares that empty seat, that empty corner, that empty hallway she’ll be there smiling at him. And it will alway be sad. It will always be that empty smile.

He wants to be angry at Hannah for what she did. He wants to be so angry about the tapes. He wants to shout at her and rage at her and hug her and hold her close. He wants to say sorry so many times that he goes hoarse and his throat closes up. He wants to lie next to her, not talking as he lies choking on the floor and she lies bleeding out in a bathtub.

It’s all he wishes, really. That even if nothing else had changed, that even if she had had to die, then she wouldn’t have been alone. But it’s too late now, isn’t it? Now Hannah is six feet under and he sees her around every corner, in every doorway, in every empty space, he will be haunted by Hannah Baker. And he knows what this will mean for him.

* * *

 

He can’t look Tony in the eyes that day because he knows what he’ll see. So instead he quietly asks him for a tape recorder and a couple fresh tapes and stares at the floor all the while.

* * *

 

He does listen to the tapes. He feels that now he owes it to Hannah. To suffer through them. To choke her stories down and he knows that it’s really all he can do to try and make it up to her.

He finds an empty seat in the park where it all began. He looks straight forwards and pretends that he can’t feel Hannah sitting next to him.

And he listens to every word she speaks and he lets the words wrap him up in her hold and he ignores how much it feels like she is choking him. He can already feel the bathroom floor pressing into his back. It’s cold. He holds onto that feeling.

A couple times, Tony texts him. Asking if he’s alright. If he needs company. He doesn’t respond. Hannah is company enough.

He lets himself believe that he isn’t leaning into her, there on that bench in the park where it all began.

Because what kind of a person finds so much comfort in the warmth of a dead girl?

* * *

 

He knows what he’ll have to do. He feels the fire burning in the pits of his stomach as he enters the Baker’s pharmacy. It feels so wrong to be here knowing what he knows. He can’t look Hannah’s dad in the eyes as he buys the nail polish he knows she wears. As he buys the candy she alway ate. As he slips the razor blades she used into his pocket when her dad looks away for a second. Hannah stands silently to his left as he pays.

He can’t look her dad in the eyes but he does anyway. 

He feels that he can see something in his own eyes but he is so wrapped up in the guilt that Clay caused him that he didn’t notice.

He holds the nail polish in his clenched fist and tries to ignore Hannah placing her hand on him.

He tries to pretend that he can’t feel her touch.

* * *

 

That night, when he is hurting and bleeding and so, so elated that he has this tape, that he has a confession, that he has his final gift to Hannah Baker, he lets himself feel happy. For just a moment, but he knows this isn’t it. What he’s feeling isn’t really ‘happy’. What he’s feeling is a sick perversion of relief, but he lets himself have it anyway because, hell, this might be the last time he feels something so buoyant in his chest, that he doesn’t feel so empty, so he still cheers and screams into the night and he lets himself melt a little bit into the hold Hannah has around him waist as she holds on to avoid floating away into the wind.

* * *

 

That night he does what he has to do. He paints the number 14 so carefully onto the new tape he made and nestles it in the box. He places the lid gently onto the box but leaves it ajar ever so slightly.

He’s not going to give them to number 12. Hannah doesn’t deserve that. 

If he gives them to number 12 then that’s the end.

Hannah just nods at him from her seat on his bed.

If he’s not giving them to number 12 then he’ll have to just pass them onto number 13 straight away. And if he does that then they’ll need some explanation.

* * *

 

The pencil makes a scratching noise on the paper as he writes.

‘ _ Dear lucky number 13… _

He writes. It’s short and sweet and straight to the point. Number 14 wasn’t there in the beginning- that was added by him. 

The pencil is heavy in his hand but Hannah tells him what to say.

* * *

 

The click of the tape recorder is loud as he switches it on. The blank tape turning and Hannah nods at him. His mouth opens and closes. It’s dry. He wonders if Hannah felt this way. Maybe she did or maybe the words just wanted to spill out over her lips and fall into everybody else’s ears. He’ll never know. He breathes in, it sticks in his throat. The bathroom floor is back. He breathes out, opens his mouth and-

_ “You may have noticed. This isn’t Hannah, this is Clay. Clay Jensen. And I’m not going to give you thirteen reasons- seems a bit excessive. No, I’m only giving you one. It’s long, you’ve already listened to it in these thirteen tapes. The words aren’t from my point of view but every one of you that killed Hannah Baker has killed me too…" _

* * *

 

The tears don’t really stop as he makes a copy. He know’s he has to  _ know _ . He has to feel what she felt. And if this is his legacy then it has to be in his hands. 

* * *

He paints the number 1 on both of them in a different colour. Red. Vibrant, angry, go faster red.  And he places one tape so carefully into the box, wraps it back up, places the lid back on the top. He takes some paper and covers it gently, caressing it so tightly and writes clearly on it;

**_Mr Porter_. **

Hannah’s gaze is so, so sad as she watches him lower the box into his backpack much like how they lower a coffin into the ground.

His gaze turns to the leftover tape. The last thing he’ll say to his friend. His legacy. 

He wraps it much the same. The same paper, the same tape, the same finesse- the same tears. He runs his fingers over the small bumps and curves. The jutting, brittle plastic. It feels so thin under his fingers, like skin, like any sudden movement would cause it to shatter and explode like a grenade in his hands. With any luck, the shards would pierce his flesh and he would fall to the ground like a leaf in the autumn. Ageing and decaying. Bleeding out on the floor.

 

_ To Tony. _

_ From Clay. _

* * *

 

That night he lies away with Hannah by his side.

He never notices she’s not really breathing.

* * *

 

It’s a strange feeling. Knowing that a day will be your last. That everyone that sees you would never see you again. Knowing that your final message is in your bag.

He knows he could turn back now. But he doesn’t want to. 

He goes to his last lesson. First period.

He doesn’t stay the entire time. He leaves five minutes early. He just walks out. 

He sits in the bathroom, hunched over. The razors are heavy in his pocket.

 

He’s not sure why he brought them with him. But at the same time, he knows why. 

He doesn’t want to forget, not even for a second, what his plan is. What his mission is.

* * *

 

He sees Tony in the halls. He walks over. Maybe Tony knows, maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything.

“Hey, Tony.”

“Hey, Clay. What’s up?”

“I finished the tapes.”

“Oh. What’re you going to do then?”

“I’m going to pass them on.”

“Okay. That’s… Okay.”

 

And Clay just walks away. Just for a moment. Hannah’s waiting for him down the corridor.

 

“Oh. And Tony?”   
“Yeah, Clay?”

“Thank you.”

“No problem. See you at lunch.”

“Yeah, see you at lunch.”

Hannah calls him over. He leaves then.

* * *

 

He just leaves the box in the office. He pulls his hood up and over his face. He leaves it on the desk when no one is looking and walks straight out. 

The hallway is empty. 

He leaves the tape in Tony’s locker.

Hannah’s waiting for him at the door.

He joins her.

* * *

 

He doesn’t really feel any guilt from just leaving school. He doesn’t feel any remorse. He just feels nothing, as Hannah would put it.

He walks home. Plain, simple. He walks home. Hannah by his side.

He opens his front door, he doesn’t shut it. His head is full of cotton wool and his eyes are swarms of bees. His movements are weird and disjointed like a puppet cut of its strings.

He walks up the stairs. Hannah points him to the wardrobe. She hands him some old clothes.

She takes his hand and leads him to the bathroom.

He draws a bath. He takes the Razors. He feels the same guilt over stealing them that Hannah did.

He feels the same desperation.

He sits in the bath. Hannah sits at the other end. 

She nods at him. 

He takes the Razor to his wrist and pulls. It hurts. But the noise of it all is trying to travel through concrete walls. It feels distant.

Hannah nods so he does it again and again. 

He head feels even more heavy and full of bees.

His chest is empty.

The water changes to a washy red. Like the colour he used on his own tape. Hannah doesn't seem to mind, she just sits with him. 

He appreciates that.

He doesn’t deserve the company, but he appreciates it. That maybe she won’t be alone this time. She bled out in the water and now so will he.

He shuts his eyes.   
He never even notices that he’s alone after all.


	2. Tony's POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I needed to do this. I'm sorry, guys.
> 
> Please, please, please comment.

It starts the day that Clay listens to his tape; the feeling that something terrible is going to happen. It’s an open pool in the pits of his stomach just waiting for a rock to hit the surface so that the waves can shatter into shards that fly everywhere. No one will be safe from the shrapnel and the damage it will cause. It will put something into motion that no one will be able to stop and no one will be able to change. 

Tony doesn’t know what it will be but he knows it will be big. 

It will be monumental and he doesn’t like the way it feels because it’s all too similar to the way he felt when Hannah was the rock that fell.

And with the way that Clay has been acting, he doesn’t like where it’s headed.

Driving him home was tense, he should have stayed maybe. Or maybe he should have pressed the matter. But he didn’t. Clay just left, didn’t even promise him. Maybe he should have sat for longer outside in the road but he didn’t.

He just drove off.

It didn’t help that the feeling just grew a little bit bigger as he watched Clay’s house grow smaller in his mirror.

* * *

 

He sat in his car just watching him listen to the tapes. It’s hard- you know- listening to a dead girl talk. Her voice is a funeral march that everybody walks to the beat of. It’s not fucking pretty. Clay never really seems to notice him. He texts a couple time. He never gets a response but at least from here, he can see the faraway gaze.

At least from here, he can see his breaths in the icy cold wind.

* * *

 

Maybe it should have been the way Clay looked when he asked for a tape recorder that set off the warning bells in his head, maybe it should have been the way he kept looking over his shoulder instead of looking him in the eyes. Maybe it should have been the fact that he almost threw himself off of a cliff the night before.

Maybe he should have seen it, but then again, so should everybody else.

* * *

 

The conversation with Clay that morning made the pool in his stomach deepen and the rocks grow looser on the cliff face. The wind is rolling in. A storm is brewing just underneath his heart and nestled in his ribcage. 

There’s something in his eyes, the way his hand fidgets in his pocket, the little crease in between his eyebrows, the rolling of the muscles in his cheeks that starts it. Maybe, just maybe, he should have smelt the relief coming off of him. Maybe he should have listened to the cries for help but he didn’t.

He didn’t fucking learn.

* * *

 

Someone asks him after first period if he knows where Clay has gone. They say he left his classroom and that no one knows where he went. 

Tony knows that he went to pass on the tapes. But something doesn’t feel  _ right _ .

The ground starts to shake and the pebbles start to drop.

* * *

 

He knows as he picks up the tape with shaking fingers, that this is it.

 

_ To Tony, _

_ From Clay. _

 

The paper is thin, it crinkles beneath his touch and tears off easily. He jams it into the walkman he always keeps on his person and presses play-

 

_ -You may have noticed. This isn’t Hannah, this is Clay. Clay Jensen. And I’m not going to give you thirteen reasons- seems a bit excessive. No, I’m only giving you one. It’s long, you’ve already listened to it in these thirteen tapes. The words aren’t from my point of view but every one of you that killed Hannah Baker has killed me too… _

The earthquake is starting, the ripples are growing and he barely even listens to the first few lines to know just what’s happening.

From that point on time seems to go too slowly. Everything is snail’s pace as he calls Clay’s number. None of the calls is picked up and every second seems to taunt him but he’d be damned if he lets another one slip through his fingers.

* * *

 

No one really seems to notice how much of a hurry he is in until he bangs open a door he knows he’s not supposed to open.

He doesn’t even pay attention to who’s getting questioned because his mind is so buzzed and he is so full of adrenaline that he only pays attention when the woman he came to get so desperately talks.

“Tony?” She looks away from the person sat in front of her. The door hits the wall behind him loudly.

“Mr Padilla? What is the meaning of this? You can’t just-” He can’t listen to this. He can’t stop, not even for a moment. Not even for a second. His heart races, his skin crawls. She looks concerned.

“Clay,” He breathes out. “It’s Clay.”

He speeds off back from where he came from. The hallway’s empty. There’s shouting behind him. He doesn’t care.

The earth is trembling. The water’s rising. He doesn’t know what to do.

* * *

His car is too slow. Never has he thought that before but right now his car is too slow. Too slow and he can feel time slipping in between his fingers like dry grains of sand.

The door is open when he arrives at the house. Wide open. He can feel all the air leaving his lungs. Not again. Not again. 

He’s not letting this happen again.

He runs in. The drip, drip is the loudest noise in the quiet, quiet house. That and his heavy breaths. 

He takes the stairs two at a time, his feet barely even touching the floor.

There’s water all over the floor and he stops. He takes a breath in, holds it and then lets it go. He places his hand on the door handle and pushes it open.

The smell of metal hits him like a wall to the face.

And there Clay is. Surrounded in red. All alone. He looks peaceful. He looks so goddamn peaceful and he hates it. He hates it so fucking much. 

He looks for a pulse. Anything, anything at all.

He grabs his phone and punches in 911.

 

_ Hello, 911, what’s your emergency? _

 

He’s holding Clay together with his bare hands, that’s his emergency but he can’t find the right words. He doesn’t know what to say.

“My friend-” He can’t breathe, “My friend tried to kill himself- slit his own wrists, I-” He chokes down the sobs. He can’t speak. He can’t breathe. He can’t-

This can’t be happening again.

He won’t let it happen again.

He gives the address.

_ An ambulance will be with you shortly. _

That’s not soon enough. Clay is- fuck- Clay is dying in his arms and, fuck, he doesn’t know what to do.

His family arrive faster than the ambulance does. He passes him over to his mum. His hands shake.

He can feel the first rock start to fall.

* * *

It’s not the same as seeing Hannah. Hannah was already dead when he saw her. This- this is so much worse. He could feel the warmth of the blood slipping through his fingers. Fuck. he could feel Clay’s life slipping through his fingers.

That isn’t something that someone can forget.

* * *

 

He goes to the hospital once. He can't look at him like that for long. 

He goes to school the next day. No one asks him what happened. The Jensen’s don’t want to tell until anything is certain.

But he can feel their glares and their curiosities and he wonders what happens now.

Everyone wants to know what happened to Clay. Everybody questions his disappearance. 

Everybody needs to know what happened.

* * *

 

He gives them the answer they wanted a week later when he comes into school and sticks a message to Clay’s locker

 

_ -Always in our memories but never forgotten- _

 

And he can see everybody watching him.

He touches Clay’s face in the picture he brought.

A tear drips down his cheek. He can’t find the energy to wipe it away.

He leaves after that and he doesn’t look back because screw high school. Screw everybody.

Screw all the people who didn’t care.

Screw all the people that make it a fucking living nightmare.

Screw all the people who killed Hannah Baker.

But most of all, screw Hannah Baker for killing herself and leaving those fucking tapes.

Because you know what? It wasn’t fucking worth it.

And now? The rocks are falling.

 

_ And Clay is dead too. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do want to do another chapter for the aftermath. Just give me some time and perhaps some ideas about how people may react.

**Author's Note:**

> So many people miss the whole point of the show. They get so hung up on the little details of it that they don't realise the actual message. That when someone kills themselves the people they leave behind are the ones who will pay for it.   
> They say that Hannah was an 'attention whore' for leaving the tapes but by the point she recorded them she had been kicked whilst she had been down so many times she just wanted to get one up on them all.  
> People don't like the fact that Clay wanted to 'love Hannah back to life', but they don't understand the desperation of loving a suicidal person. The need to be enough and knowing that you aren't. The knowledge that if you aren't enough then they'll die. It puts a strain on them. It pushes them down and it breaks them. Trust me, I know.  
> But, ultimately, I think the most important thing they did as a show to get the message across is Alex trying to kill himself. Because it shows us, the audience, how easy it is to miss the signs. Because they did show signs in the show and we were so caught up in the storyline of Hannah that we ignored them. It also shows people the effect their deaths would have on people left behind.   
> I just... I needed to get that out. Thanks for listening and thanks for reading.


End file.
